“Reconnecting with siblings later. I entered care with 3 siblings, the younger 2 were adopted and I exited care with one. Saying ‘I love you’ when you haven’t seen someone for long time, especially when you don’t say ‘I love you’ to anyone, is difficult.” Read More

For the last three years, I was the Senior Director of Community Advocacy at SAFE, formerly SafePlace. I was over the legal department, the Sexual Assault Advocacy department, the SAFE Futures program, which is their CPS advocacy… I started the forensic nursing program and ran that as well, and then PlanetSafe, which is their safe exchange and visitation program.

The other half was Community Advocacy. I was the liaison for the District Attorney’s (DA) office on anything criminal justice related, so I chaired the Sexual Assault Response and Resource Team and the Family Violence Protection Team, all the community-coordinated responses that had to do with sexual assault or domestic violence. Read More

When you hear the term disproportionality in terms of advocacy work, you are essentially talking about an overrepresentation of a particular group in a particular system, as compared to the members in the general population. So for child welfare, we have an overrepresentation of children of color within the system. When we talk about disproportionality, you also see the overrepresentation of people of color in general when you look at the criminal justice system, when you look at education disciplinary practices, when you look at who is getting mental health services and who's not getting mental health services. I like to tell people that you can pretty much go to every major system and you will see an overrepresentation of people of color within those systems. Read More

Our 2017 Board President, David Rubin, describes himself as a “serial tech entrepreneur” and has recently started his fifth company. He started his first company in college, dumpster diving behind carpet manufacturers’ warehouses for scrap pieces that could be cut perfectly down to dorm room size. After plastering Jester dormitory with flyers, his business became so successful that he started cutting wholesale deals with manufacturers. At the end of the semester, he would clean the carpet remnants, store them over the summer and sell to a new batch of freshmen in the fall. Read More

With the Oscars approaching, we’ve taken a look at the themes of some of the movies nominated for awards (and a few we wish were nominated) and how they’re relevant to the work we do at CASA. The films released over the past year cover topics including trauma, foster care, adoption, placements with relatives, diversity, confronting our own biases and more. Here are some of our staff-recommended films of the year (and each of these can count as Continuing Education hours for our volunteer advocates!):

Hunt for the Wilderpeople: “The best thing about this movie is how it shows people who seemingly have nothing in common with the children they have been asked to care for..." Read More